In 2011 I went to forty major cities in thirty countries on five continents to film street performers. We went to a new city every week. Traveling like that – seeing so many cities in such a short time – it doesn’t take long to start to feel that city centres are nothing but a tool set up to help people get from point A to point B via a Starbucks.Only one thing continued to stand out: the buskers.

As he sat in a PPS training watching time-lapse films of Bryant Park in the early 1980s, Keith Hampton realized he may have just found precisely the baseline he needed to examine how behavior in public space has changed in our contemporary digital world. The resulting study is a first for urban public space research.

I recently went on a “Jane’s Walk” of three public plazas in Queens to celebrate the legacy of Jane Jacobs. On the tour, organized by the Neighborhood Plaza Partnership, I was reminded of an important voice in the dialog about public space – children. While the need for thriving parks, playgrounds and recreational facilities in every neighborhood cannot be overstated, public plazas also play a unique role in the lives of children.

Larkin Square is a privately owned public space located near the heart of Buffalo, New York, owned and managed by Leslie - Director of Fun! - her husband Howard Zemsky, and their son Harry. What started out as a complex for the Larkin Soap Company (now long gone) has turned into a community center through mixed-use renovations and a town square that represents triangulation at its best.

Paris is now a radically different place. Less than half of Parisian households own a car and those who do use them far less than the inhabitants of other cities. People have become attached to the quality of life that urban spaces designed as places, and not as conduits for traffic, allow. To be perceived as intending to take that away would be electoral folly for an aspiring Mayor.

Latino Placemaking goes beyond creating great public spaces. It also includes cultural identity, which is shaped by needs, desires, and imagination. The Latino quest for cultural identity parallels the African-American Civil Rights Movement of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, which has its genesis in protests - many of which were carried out in public spaces.

Widely read articles published recently in The New York Times Magazine and The Guardian affirmed the importance of detailed observation and measurement tools developed by PPS for analyzing public spaces and update their application to the digital age.

As an architect and urbanist who has grown up and lived in cities most of his life, I consider the quality of public spaces to be the key to successful urban environments. Earlier this year in my adopted home city of Belfast, Ireland, a proposal to redevelop a small triangular street intersection into a new [...]

In 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake changed the face of downtown Santa Cruz, damaging dozens of buildings and hobbling the local retail scene. The Cooper House, which had been a key public gathering space in this oceanfront city’s core, was ruined. When the site was re-developed, a larger building was placed along the street, and [...]

Andrew Howard is one of the founding members of Team Better Block, a group that works to implement Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper strategies for the temporary revitalization of streets and public spaces in the short-term, to inspire people to think differently about how those places could evolve. Team Better Block recently took recommendations straight from PPS’s [...]

What do you want to see happening in your favorite public spaces? This is one of the questions at the core of the Placemaking process, and getting responses from as many different people as possible has always been central to what we do at the Project for Public Spaces. But now, as our work in [...]

Library culture in the city of Houston is undergoing an exciting shift as the Houston Public Library reconsiders its public role. Instead of thinking of its programming as needing to remain within the building’s four walls, recent efforts are pulling the activity into outdoor spaces. Building upon the momentum of other successful downtown projects, Director [...]